AMD Launches New Embedded Fusion Chips

AMD also reportedly is looking to sell as many as 9 million "Llano" chips for mainstream notebooks by the end of the year.

Advanced Micro Devices is rolling out
two new low-power Fusion chips aimed at the embedded market that company
officials say offer as much as 39 percent power savings over previous versions.
The newest members of AMD's Embedded
G-Series APUs (accelerated processing units) have a thermal design power rating
of 5.5 and 6.4 watts in a 361mm package, and are aimed at such fanless embedded
jobs as digital signage, kiosks, mobile industrial devices and new
industry-standard small form factors.

It is the third time this year that AMD
has launched embedded Fusion chips. The company calls chips in the Fusion
family APUs because of the graphics capabilities that are integrated onto the
same piece of silicon as the CPU.

AMD announced the first of the Fusion
chips-including the first embedded offerings-during the Consumer Electronics
Show in January, and then again in March during the Embedded World
Show 2011 in Germany.
AMD officials have targeted the highly
competitive embedded space as a growth market for the company, given the
increasing use of embedded systems in such areas as thin clients, digital
signage, point-of-sale systems and kiosks, automobiles, telecommunications, and
networking. Not only is AMD competing with traditional x86 rivals Intel and Via
Technologies, but also with vendors that build chips based on designs from ARM
Holdings. AMD officials in January estimated that x86 chips have about a third
of what they said is a $10 billion embedded processor market.
The new single- and dual-core Embedded
G-Series APUs, based on the "Bulldozer" core, offer the size and low-power
consumption that is becoming increasingly important in the embedded space,
according to AMD officials.

"We have seen many of our embedded
customers deploy fanless systems even with our 15W TDP processors in the past.
Today we take the ground-breaking AMD Fusion APU well below 7W TDP and shatter
the accepted traditional threshold for across-the-board fanless enablement,"
Buddy Broeker, director of embedded solutions at AMD, said in a statement.
"System designers can now unleash their creativity without being constrained by
heat or size issues."
AMD officials announced the new chips
May 23, the same day a report was published in DigiTimes in which unnamed sources
said the chip vendor expects to ship 8 million to 9 million of its upcoming
"Llano" APUs for mainstream notebooks through the end of the year. That
includes 1.5 million in July, when systems containing the chip should start
appearing, according to the report. AMD interim CEO Thomas Seifert had
announced in April that the 32-nanometer Llano chips had begun shipping.
If AMD hits its goal, it will increase
is market share in the PC chip market to 15 percent, according to the sources.
In addition, AMD expects to ship six
Llano and four Bulldozer APUs for desktops, according to the report, which also
listed prices for the chips. The pricing can be found in the DigiTimes report.